One Second Before the Big Bang - Early Development of the Universe

One Second Before the Big Bang

Early Development of the Universe

One Second Before the Big BangEarly Development of the Universe

Experimental video art about the birth of the universe,
the creation of time & space, the solar system, technology and
the beginning of life on earth. The universe seems theoretically impossible, yet it exists. In the beginning, there was nothing. No space, no time, and then there was light. This video lets you experience the creation of the universe since science cannot explain how the universe was created. Open your mind.

The big bang theory purports to explain some of the earliest events in the universe. The absolute earliest state of things before the big bang, or where the energy came from which was needed to produce the big bang is currently unknown.

The Big Bang is the prevailing cosmological theory of the early development of the universe.

Cosmologists
use the term Big Bang to refer to the idea that the universe was
originally extremely hot and dense at some finite time in the past and
has since cooled by expanding to the present diluted state and continues
to expand today.

The theory is supported by the most comprehensive and accurate explanations from current scientific evidence and observation.

According to the best available measurements as of 2010, the initial conditions occurred around 13.3 to 13.9 billion years ago.

Georges Lemaître proposed what became known as the Big Bang theory of
the origin of the Universe, although he called it his "hypothesis of the
primeval atom".

The framework for the model relies on Albert Einstein's general
relativity and on simplifying assumptions (such as homogeneity and
isotropy of space).

The governing equations had been formulated by Alexander Friedmann.

After Edwin Hubble discovered in 1929 that the distances to far away
galaxies were generally proportional to their redshifts, as suggested by
Lemaître in 1927.

This observation was taken to indicate that all very
distant galaxies and clusters have an apparent velocity directly away
from our vantage point: the farther away, the higher the apparent
velocity.

If the distance between galaxy clusters is increasing today, everything must have been closer together in the past.

This idea has been considered in detail back in time to
extreme densities and temperatures, and large particle accelerators have
been built to experiment on and test such conditions, resulting in
significant confirmation of the theory, but these accelerators have
limited capabilities to probe into such high energy regimes.

Without any evidence associated with the earliest instant of the expansion, the Big Bang theory cannot and does not provide any explanation for such an initial condition; rather, it describes and explains the general evolution of the Universe since that instant.

The observed
abundances of the light elements throughout the cosmos closely match
the calculated predictions for the formation of these elements from
nuclear processes in the rapidly expanding and cooling first minutes of
the Universe, as logically and quantitatively detailed according to Big
Bang nucleosynthesis.

Fred Hoyle is credited with coining the term Big Bang during a 1949 radio broadcast.

It is popularly reported that Hoyle, who favored an alternative "steady
state" cosmological model, intended this to be pejorative, but Hoyle
explicitly denied this and said it was just a striking image meant to
highlight the difference between the two models.

Hoyle later helped considerably in the effort to understand stellar
nucleosynthesis, the nuclear pathway for building certain heavier
elements from lighter ones.

After the discovery of the cosmic microwave background radiation in
1964, and especially when its spectrum (i.e., the amount of radiation
measured at each wavelength) sketched out a blackbody curve, most
scientists were fairly convinced by the evidence that some Big Bang
scenario must have occurred.

The Big Bang and Beyond The Big Bang theory developed from observations of the structure of the Universe and from theoretical considerations.

In 1912 Vesto Slipher measured the first Doppler shift of a "spiral nebula" (spiral nebula is the obsolete term for spiral galaxies), and soon discovered that almost all such nebulae were receding from Earth.

He did not grasp the cosmological implications of this fact, and indeed at the time it was highly controversial whether or not these nebulae were "island universes" outside our Milky Way.

Ten years later, Alexander Friedmann, a Russian cosmologist and mathematician, derived the Friedmann equations from Albert Einstein's equations of general relativity, showing that the Universe might be expanding in contrast to the static Universe model advocated by Einstein at that time.

In 1924, Edwin Hubble's measurement of the great distance to the nearest spiral nebulae showed that these systems were indeed other galaxies. Independently deriving Friedmann's equations in 1927, Georges Lemaître, a Belgian physicist and Roman Catholic priest, proposed that the inferred recession of the nebulae was due to the expansion of the Universe.

In 1931 Lemaître went further and suggested that the evident expansion of the universe, if projected back in time, meant that the further in the past the smaller the universe was, until at some finite time in the past all the mass of the Universe was concentrated into a single point, a "primeval atom" where and when the fabric of time and space came into existence.

Starting in 1924, Hubble painstakingly developed a series of distance indicators, the forerunner of the cosmic distance ladder, using the 100-inch (2,500 mm) Hooker telescope at Mount Wilson Observatory. This allowed him to estimate distances to galaxies whose redshifts had already been measured, mostly by Slipher.

Birth Of Universe

In 1929, Hubble discovered a correlation between distance and recession velocity—now known as Hubble's law.

Lemaître had already shown that this was expected, given the Cosmological Principle.

During the 1930s other ideas were proposed as non-standard cosmologies to explain Hubble's observations, including the Milne model, the oscillatory Universe (originally suggested by Friedmann, but advocated by Albert Einstein and Richard Tolman) and Fritz Zwicky's tired light hypothesis.

After World War II, two distinct possibilities emerged. One was Fred Hoyle's steady state model, whereby new matter would be created as the Universe seemed to expand. In this model, the Universe is roughly the same at any point in time.

The other was Lemaître's Big Bang theory, advocated and developed by George Gamow, who introduced big bang nucleosynthesis (BBN) and whose associates, Ralph Alpher and Robert Herman, predicted the cosmic microwave background radiation (CMB).

Ironically, it was Hoyle who coined the phrase that came to be applied to Lemaître's theory, referring to it as "this big bang idea" during a BBC Radio broadcast in March 1949.

For a while, support was split between these two theories.

Eventually, the observational evidence, most notably from radio source counts, began to favor Big Bang over Steady State. The discovery and confirmation of the cosmic microwave background radiation in 1964 secured the Big Bang as the best theory of the origin and evolution of the cosmos.

Much of the current work in cosmology includes understanding how galaxies form in the context of the Big Bang, understanding the physics of the Universe at earlier and earlier times, and reconciling observations with the basic theory.

Huge strides in Big Bang cosmology have been made since the late 1990s as a result of major advances in telescope technology as well as the analysis of copious data from satellites such as COBE, the Hubble Space Telescope and WMAP.

Cosmologists now have fairly precise and accurate measurements of many of the parameters of the Big Bang model, and have made the unexpected discovery that the expansion of the Universe appears to be accelerating.

Recent observations indicate that this expansion is accelerating because of dark energy, and that most of the matter in the universe may be in a form which cannot be detected by present instruments, and so is not accounted for in the present models of the universe; this has been named dark matter.

The imprecision of current observations has hindered predictions of the ultimate fate of the universe.

The UniverseBeyond the Big Bang

In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep.

And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. And God said, Let there be light: and there was light.

And God saw the light, and it was good: and God divided the light from the darkness.

The Big Bang is a scientific theory, and as such is dependent on its agreement with observations. But as a theory which addresses the origins of reality, it has always carried theological and philosophical implications, most notably, the concept of creation ex nihilo (Latin meaning "out of nothing").

In the 1920s and 1930s almost every major cosmologist preferred an eternal steady state Universe, and several complained that the beginning of time implied by the Big Bang imported religious concepts into physics; this objection was later repeated by supporters of the steady state theory.

This perception was enhanced by the fact that the originator of the Big Bang theory, Monsignor Georges Lemaître, was a Roman Catholic priest. Pope Pius XII declared, at the November 22, 1951 opening meeting of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, that the Big Bang theory accorded with the Catholic concept of creation.

Conservative Protestant Christian denominations have also welcomed the Big Bang theory as supporting a historical interpretation of the doctrine of creation. Since the acceptance of the Big Bang as the dominant physical cosmological paradigm, there have been a variety of reactions by religious groups as to its implications for their respective religious cosmologies.

Some accept the scientific evidence at face value, while others seek to reconcile the Big Bang with their religious tenets, and others completely reject or ignore the evidence for the Big Bang theory.

The assumptions of naturalism that underlie the scientific method have led some scientists, especially observationalists, to question whether the ultimate reason or source for the universe to exist can be answered in a scientific fashion.

In particular, the principle of sufficient reason seems to indicate that there should be such an explanation, but whether a satisfactory explanation can be obtained through scientific inquiry is debatable.

A scientific examination of cosmogony using existing physical models would face many challenges. For example, equations used to develop models of the origin do not in themselves explain how the conditions of the universe that the equations model came to be in the first place.

Theistic explanations for origins indicate one or more supernatural beings as the explanation, though atheist commentators often point to this as an argument from ignorance or a God of the gaps fallacy, and that such an assumption provides no explanation for existence of the deity.

Nondual explanations by contrast state that the very question is misleading, since it contains erroneous assumptions of beginnings, endings and the nature of existence itself, and consider the visible universe as phenomenology.